The recent Open Ed conference in Vancouver, with its theme of Beyond Content and an agenda that included diverse topics such as Transformation in Arts, Languages and Math, Open Assessment and Credentialing, as well as the profile of attendees, vividly demonstrated that the open education movement has
far outgrown the original set of initiatives and card-carrying evangelists. The discourse is increasingly toward implications of openness in all aspects of the educational value chain, including its potential as a sustainable force for change. This is welcome and gratifying: the recommendations presented in Opening Up Education, while pointing to the initial success of open education’s gathering storm, also made a plea for considering systemic implications so that its transformative potential could be realized.

Overall, open education has engendered an educational ecology characterized not only by abundant resources, but greater agency to learners and communities. These characteristics position us to better address significant challenges such as educational cost, college completion, quality, persistence and performance. A good example is the Kaleidoscope Project, where seven community colleges collaboratively created courses using existing OERs. Kaeidoscope has demonstrated a significant reduction in cost/course/student (~ 98.%), however it also focuses on improving course design and learning results.

The latest entrant to the open education suite are MOOCS such as edX, which not only provide learning experiences at an unprecedented scale but usher in new opportunities for innovation—in how learning experiences are produced, where learning happens, how it is assessed and credentialed. They allow us to envision more profound structural changes in the relationship between individuals, institutions and learning and ultimately in the economics of education.

There are still significant challenges of readiness related to content and culture to be addressed in order to render this gathering movement a perfect storm of transformation, but the signs suggest that it is ripe for the opportunity.

“It appears impossible for anyone seriously interested in our civilization to ignore this book. It is a ‘must’ book for those in every branch of science—engineers (all kinds), mathematicians, physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, chemists (all kinds), psychopathologists, neuroanatomists, neurophysiologists, etc. In addition, economists, politicians, statesmen, and businessmen cannot afford to overlook cybernetics and its tremendous, even terrifying, implications…

Professor Wiener calls this ‘a preliminary book’ on the subject of cybernetics. It is a beautifully written book, lucid, direct, and, despite its complexity, as readable by the layman as the trained scientist, if the former is willing to forego attempts to understand mathematical formulas.”

October 24, 2012

I am glad to see that open source software continues to be of significant interest to researchers and practitioners. I believe it truly is a disruptive technology which has had a massive effect on fields and methods of organizing outside of software development, e.g., open innovation, crowdsourcing, and open data. This extends the idea of knowledge transfer, permeation, and exploitation across the boundaries of organizations and communities, with implications well beyond the software domain as it suggests new models of work organization and innovation. I was quite excited about the recent NASA announcement that they were to collaborate with Karim Lakhani at Harvard University on crowdsourcing software development initiative. Basically, developers will compete to solve software development problems in the mode of "optimistic concurrency" that has served the open source software phenomenon so well. This could lead to very exciting software development possibilities.

One issue that surprises me, however, is that for all the great awareness and understanding of open source software and its complexities, there seems to be no corresponding general awareness or interest in open standards. The latter are key to ensuring the future of open source software. They ensure that open source solutions can always be available to match proprietary ones. Open standards are also critical to underpin open data, which is a really exciting frontier for the future.

Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) provides
an excellent time for a little reflection on the state of our access to
research and scholarship. While some of us had been hoping for a digital
revolution in access to research and scholarship that would suddenly and fully turn
this entire realm of learning into a vast public asset, we are coming to accept
that, instead, a series of evolutionary
forces are underway, at least when you look at things as a matter of a
decade or two, rather than over eons of time.

The evolutionary
markers, well worth celebrating this year, are found in the growing acceptance
of open access as a guiding principle for scholarly communication. The markers
include the gradual increases this year, to over 8,000 journals, in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the 250 open
access mandates among universities, departments and institutes included in ROARMAP. Also notable, perhaps as more
of a moment of punctuated equilibrium in this evolution, is the first open
access journal from the American Psychological Association, with a lovely retro
title, Archives of Scientific Psychology,
which will also feature, according to its editors,
open data sharing and open reviews. MIT Press has also been among the
publishers experimenting with open access approaches to journals and books.

Another relatively
recent source of open-access innovation comes from the rise of mega-journals,
following in the footsteps of PLoS
One, (with roughly 14,000 articles annually), including the Nature Publishing
Group, with Scientific Reports, the Royal
Society, with Open Biology, and from the British
Medical Association, BMJ Open. The
mega-journal, tapping the article-processing-fees model, forms a notable
instance of where this move toward open access has led to a new publishing
principle affecting scholarly communication. By publishing on the principle that
the peer-reviewed competence and contribution of a paper should be sufficient
to warrant immediate publication in the digital age, given no real restrictions
on journal size (compared to print) and the sheer epistemological
inefficiencies of a highly discriminatory journal hierarchy.

As Phil
Davis points out, the mega-journal model raises equity issues for authors
and may disrupt non-profit society publishing. The cautions are well-noted, but
still it is hard to resist, having wished and worked for this increased access,
concluding that an irrevocable evolution toward this opening of research and
scholarship is underway. But then a moment’s reflection reminds one that the
Royal Society of London was behind such an opening from the very beginning of
journal publishing, if perhaps without the business acumen that it may now be showing.

About a month ago, news outlets reported that the music
streaming app, Grooveshark, had been pulled from Google Play (Google’s App
distribution service) for violation of its copyright infringement
policies. The app and its related online
service allow users to upload songs they own to Grooveshark’s servers. From there the songs can be streamed to
anyone with access to the app or to Grooveshark’s online site, creating a sort
of on demand radio populated by content uploaded by users.

There are, of course, a number of legal
problems with the service and the technology upon which it is built, not least
of which are claims by the music industry that Grooveshark and its parent
company (Escape Media Group) are engaging in widespread contributory
infringement of copyright. Claims by
Grooveshark that it is an internet service provider (much like YouTube) and
therefore protected from contributory liability by what is arguably a far-reaching interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “Safe Harbor”
clause may have found some sympathy in the courts, but to this observer, the
deeper issue is how technologies like Grooveshark (looking a lot like Napster
circa 1999 without the download option) continue to have traction among users
who have “grown up” with industry-sponsored lessons on the “rights” and
“wrongs” of digital copyright.

Perhaps
what the industry fails to see is that user practices in the consumption of
digital content are becoming fixed and reproduced by a matrix of other digital
technologies and services that quite literally make an argument for leaky
content. Why should a video stay on your
phone if it can immediately go up on YouTube? There’s an app for that. Why should
your music stay on your hard drive when you can upload it to the cloud? There’s an app for that, too. A host of digital technologies invite users
to leak their content out of their original vessels onto other platforms. The social web is built on that premise. The “upload” option has become not only a
technical standard on digital devices but also a cultural norm among many users
(especially younger ones).

In my opinion,
Grooveshark is not like YouTube enough to warrant “Safe Harbor” protection and
the music industry is likely to make that argument eventually stick. Google may, at least, be legally
vindicated for removing the app. However, Grooveshark is part of a technological ecology that invites sharing,
that generally forgoes questions of copyright for after the fact and that
builds business models upon an upload culture. For the music industry, that will be considerably harder to curb.

September 17, 2012

Happy Monday! Here's some eye candy from The Color Revolution by Regina Lee Blaszczyk. There are so many great images in this book (121 color illustrations, to be exact) that we're splitting this eye candy post in two--check back next week for more from this book. As always, click on each image to enlarge.

The color revolution grew out of
American industry’s drive for efficiency in design, production, and
distribution. This is the cover of a 1939 catalog published by the Kalamazoo
Stove Company.

How You Can Do Your Own Color
Planning with Sears Harmony House “Go-Together” Colors (Chicago, 1955).

Advertisement by Monsanto Chemical
Company in Fortune, September 1946.

August 03, 2012

I recently returned from Lebanon, where I was working with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) focused on violence prevention. It might seem preposterous to some people that an NGO could have a role to play in transforming conflict in a country that suffered from civil war from 1975 to 1990. But the approach being developed by the leaders of this Beirut-headquartered NGO is to try to prevent violence from breaking out at a local level, on the theory that often trivial matters spark a fire of bloodshed.

Specifically, the approach they are taking is to develop a conflict early warning and early response system. They have already put together an impressive network of volunteers who have been trained in mediation. They have not, however, developed a way to collect information systematically so as to be informed quickly enough to engage that network in effective response.

During my time in Beirut, I attended a meeting to launch an excellent report by Conciliation Resources entitled Reconciliation, reform and resilience: Positive peace for Lebanon. After the report was introduced, there was a lively discussion among NGO workers. Most of the conversation centered on the need for structural prevention—in other words, engaging with the root causes of societal tension in this country comprised of some 18 distinct ethno-political groups. After I pointed out the need for operational prevention—that is, responding to incipient violence before it happens—I was struck by the resistance in the room. There was a sense that people were already working hard on dealing with inter-religious cooperation, in building social harmony. To address operational prevention was viewed as watering down the more important structural work that needs to be done—like developing a better peace agreement that will be more sustainable and less tenuous, or focusing on a modification to school text books that do not contain historical references to conflict in Lebanon, constituting a collective amnesia that is pathological to the body politic.

As the discussion progressed, I found two additional reasons why there is resistance to operational prevention. First, since preventing incipient violence needs to have an early warning capacity so there can be an early response, and because communication through social media is seen as a promising medium for getting data on when and where violence is likely, there is a sense among NGOs that they are being thrust onto the social media bandwagon whether they want to be or not. To them, not only are donors looking for immediate results, they are also fickle, pursuing the “flavor of the month or year” as if to be switching favorite ice creams from one hot summer to the next.

The other reason for resistance is a mistaken view that using technology for operational prevention requires widespread internet access. That simply is not true. Most of the violence prevention systems that I have seen usually rely mainly on phone calls or text messages. The widespread use of mobile phones used by volunteers (a "trust network") communicating with a centralized coordinating entity is a relatively inexpensive and simple way to create an early warning system. If those in the trust network are trained in how to intervene to prevent violence, then early response is possible. Phone calls can also be made to mid- and top-level leaders who can bring their authority to bear, communicating that there will be consequences (such as jail time) for those who participate in property destruction or, worse still, harming and killing people. The internet is helpful for the centralized node. If text messages and information from phone calls are placed on a digital map, then viewing the depiction of events leading up to greater tension is helpful for those in the trust network to see, but it is not essential. In fact, the cell phones can be used to send warnings to those near the location where violence is likely to occur—what Patrick Meier calls crowdfeeding—they do not need to see clusters of events on an internet-based map. The bottom line: Conflict early warning and early response systems using so-called social media typically have cell phones as their main technology. Internet access is helpful to the extent that digital mapping is used to depict locations of events.

Sure, there are unrealistic expectations about the power of social media. It is a mistake, however, to assume that such media needs to be "high tech" (as in collecting data from Twitter or Facebook). The hard part of conflict early warning and early response is creating the civil society infrastructure of a trust network—people who will send credible information, who know how to respond quickly to a potential outbreak of violence. The easier part is the social media component—creating a categorization scheme for text messages of the major events to be tracked, using cell phones to send messages and to call people who can be instrumental at nipping violence in the bud. The civil society infrastructure is the foundation. The social media is a helpful way to facilitate systematic collection and dissemination of information. The internet helps to keep track of what is going on where, but it is not necessarily needed by those in the trust network.

Of course, there are places where there is no cell phone service. In such locations, organizations are sending trained staff members using High Frequency radios into conflict hot spots. For instance, the Conflict Early Warning project (CEWARN) of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development in East Africa uses radios with its field monitors working in places where there is no cell phone service but where there is deadly violence, often related to cattle raids. Here again, it is possible to set up an early warning system without the internet.

We need not get distracted by a lack of internet penetration. We must keep learning from innovators in the global south who devise ways to communicate when danger is at their doorstep.

Joseph G. Bock is Director of Global Health Training and Teaching Professor in the Eck Institute for Global Health and University-wide Liaison with Catholic Relief Services at the University of Notre Dame. He has more than a decade of experience in humanitarian relief and development.

July 24, 2012

“The Simple Science of Flighthas been my sweetheart ever since I started dreaming of it, back in 1978. It has become a favorite of many readers all over the world. Its revitalization and rejuvenation will surely endear it to the next generation of people who are, like me, enthralled by everything that flies.”—Henk Tennekes

In June of 1940, German troops marched into France for the second time in less than thirty years. On June 17, Marshal Pétain announced that he would seek peace with Hitler. Charles de Gaulle launched the Resistance the following day in a broadcast from London. Thus began four years of opprobrious occupation and fractured resistance. In June of 1944, Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate a nation humiliated by defeat, ravaged by war, disgraced by collaboration, and only partly redeemed by resistance…

No wonder, then, that the nation expressed such enthusiasm when Zoé, its first experimental nuclear reactor, underwent a chain reaction in December 1948, only four years after the Liberation. This success, proclaimed one newspaper, was “a great achievement, French and peaceful, which strengthens our role in the defense of civilization.” The following year, scientists isolated France’s first milligram of plutonium. President Vincent Auriol paid Zoé a visit and solemnly declared: “This achievement will add to the radiance of France.”

“The radiance of France”—a phrase usually interchangeable with “the grandeur of France”—appeared regularly in many realms of postwar discourse. These two notions referred back to France’s glorious past, from the golden reign of Louis XIV to the “civilizing mission” of the empire. France’s radiance had taken a severe beating during the war, and decolonization threatened to hasten the decline. How could the nation regain its former glory? What would radiance or grandeur mean in the radically reconfigured geopolitics of the postwar world?

Technical and scientific experts offered a solution to these dilemmas: technological prowess. In articles, lectures, and modernization plans, experts repeatedly linked technological achievement with French radiance. Industrial, scientific, and technological development would not only rebuild the nation’s economy but also restore France to its place as a world leader. For the nascent nuclear program, “le rayonnement de la France” carried special punch: “rayonnement” means radiation as well as radiance.

June 27, 2012

June is Children’s Awareness Month in the United States. To celebrate, here are a few titles that talk about children—where they live, how they are raised, what they play--and why (or why not) we have them.

Children Without a State, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, is the first book to address children’s statelessness and lack of legal status as a human rights issue.

Edited by Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert, Companions in Wonder is an anthology of adventures with children in the natural world, from capturing fireflies to encountering a grizzly bear.

Engineering Play by Mizuko Ito explains how the influential industry that produced such popular games as Oregon Trail and KidPix emerged from experimental efforts to use computers as tools in child-centered learning.

Parentonomics by Joshua Gans talks about what every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting.

Christine Overall’s Why Have Children is a wide-ranging exploration of whether or not choosing to procreate can be morally justified--and if so, how.